Random thoughts of a computer scientist who is working behind the enemy lines; and lately turned into a double agent.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

New Class: Search and the New Economy

Next semester, I will be teaching an MBA class with the title "Search and the New Economy," and I will be also participating in the undergraduate version of the class, taught by Norm White. The intended audience for the class are MBA students, that have interest in technology but are not necessarily programmers.

I have been thinking a lot on how to organize such a class, so that it has some internal structure and flow. My current list of topics:

Social Search and Collective Intelligence: Wikis and Collaborative Production

Ownership of Electronic Data: Privacy on the Web

Ownership of Electronic Data: Intellectual Property issues on the Web

Ownership of Electronic Data: The Future of Privacy and Intellectual Property

Future Directions and Wrapping‐up

Some rough sketches of the assignments for this course:

Run and optimize an online advertising campaign, using Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter.

Analyze the visitorship data of an online website to analyze the effectiveness of different pages. You can use Google Analytics, or tools like CrazyEgg

Optimize the keyword campaign of a company by choosing the appropriate keywords and bid amounts, depending on the competition and the rank of the organic pages.

Analyze (or build) a recommender system for movies, books, and TV Shows using Facebook data.

Build a dating recommendation system using Facebook data

Build prediction markets at Inkling Markets, for an event of interest, examine the accuracy of the predictions, and analyze the behavior of the participants. Alternatively, analyze real‐money prediction markets at InTrade and BetFair and examine the effect of real‐life events in political campaigns.